Thursday, October 23, 2014

Weapons vs. Armor in Old School D&D, Part III

Author's Note:
this is the long overdue third part of a series that I began over eight months
ago (Part II was on 17 February). Those interested in the topic are directed to
the first two installments here and here (don't worry, these posts are not long by
this blogger's current standards).

To recap, some editions of Old School
D&D (which I defined expansively as including all editions prior to
3.0) offer a mechanic to simulate how different weapons perform against
different types of armor. In other words, they offer not merely a system where
tougher armor makes the target harder to hit in general, but a system where
some weapons will have advantages or disadvantages over others based on the type
of armor involved—leather, mail, plate, shield or no shield, etc.
The motivations for adding such a mechanic are to make combat more
realistic as well as more interesting, while in the bargain adding more
meaningful choices for players in their selection of weapons. I set out these
criteria for evaluating the success of each effort (these are stated almost
verbatim from Part II):

Realism.
You want to realistically simulate how actual historical weapons performed
against actual historical armor.

Playability.
You don't want the system to be too complicated or fussy.

Enhancing (or at least not impeding) weapon
diversity. You want the system to give players
more meaningful choices in weapon selection, or at least that the range of
choices should not be narrowed any further. So, for example, if in the basic
combat mechanic a sword is almost always better then a mace, then ideally the
additional weapons vs. armor type mechanic would give players more of a reason
to (sometimes) fight with a mace—perhaps blunt weapons are better than bladed
weapons against really tough armor, or whatever. Enhancing weapon diversity is
almost by definition more 'realistic' in that we know that historical medieval
and renaissance fighters used a variety of different weapons. The criterion is
also almost self-evidently true in that if all the new system does is to mimic
or amlify trends present in the initial mechanic, it isn't clear that there is
any need for the new system. For example, if in the original system a
two-handed sword does 1-10 points of damage and a dagger does 1-4 points of
damage (translating into the sword being more than twice as effective as a dagger),
one might wonder whether there is really any point in imposing an additional
mechanic stating that, say, against most types of armor a two-handed sword gets
an average +x bonus to hit, whereas a dagger gets an average -x penalty to hit,
etc. One could have just as easily have simply increased the basic damage of a
sword and/or decreased the basic damage of a dagger.

In Part II, I evaluated the weapons vs.
armor mechanic presented in the proto-D&D 'man-to-man' combat system of Chainmail,
characterizing it apologetically and perhaps reluctantly as a 'failure', at
least on balance. The first edition of D&D (the 1974 'three little
brown books') did not offer a new weapons vs. armor variant. However the first
supplement, Greyhawk, did. It is here that we resume...

Greyhawk
came out in the Spring of 1975, only a bit more than a year after the first
publication of Dungeons & Dragons—a time in which perhaps only a few
thousand copies of the game had been sold. Among other new things, Greyhawk
introduced variable damage by weapon--a combat option that was soon to be
embraced by most players. In one form or another it would became the default
for most subsequent versions of the game (the Holmes 'Basic Set' being the
exception). It will be useful to consider this addition here:

Note how, at least if we ignore the
‘space required’ restrictions, these numbers seem to separate weapons into two
groups—a small group of weapons that we would always want to use, and a much
larger group of weapons that we would never want to use. The two-handed sword
is the nuke. Though, there are a few other weapons worth considering if one
wants one’s second hand free to hold a shield.On the other side, many other weapons are relegated to oblivion in that they
have 'twins' that seem obviously better, even if only a little bit better, than
their alternatives. However, the table does for the first time highlight why
the restrictions on normal weapons for Clerics and Magic-Users might
actually be onerous. (In the 1974 edition, the onerous consequences had more to
do with restrictions on what magic weapons Clerics and Magic-Users could
or could not use.)

But from the point of view
of historical realism there is much that is odd. For example, why are
maces so ineffective? Knights and other accomplished soldiers often went
into battle wielding maces (and almost never large two-handed swords—unless
they were Scottish). This is presumably because they thought maces were
effective in combat, not because they were prohibited from shedding blood, or
whatever. So why are they presented as so ineffective here?

Of course, paying attention to the space
requirements does modify the above assessment a bit. For example, maybe you
can't use that two-hander in many dungeon situations. I think it's fair to say
that most referees didn’t and don’t often take this into account. Perhaps they
should. But I think it's also fair to fault the authors for providing no further
guidance on this in an otherwise fairly detailed treatment of other combat
matters. However, the space requirements don't remove all of the oddities. For
example, it's still always better to have
a sword instead of a mace or a two-handed sword instead of a halberd or flail. Also, the 'space required' caveat doesn't help with the knight counter-example (they usually went into battle in open fields).

In addition, the
1975 supplement introduced a system derived directly from Chainmail for
giving bonuses and penalties on the d20 'to hit' roll for different weapons
against different types of armor. Here are the relevant tables:

(Note the Arquebus, a holdover from Chainmail, which along with other
gunpowder weapons was not included in the weapon lists of any of the early
editions of D&D.)

If one compares the Greyhawk table
with the Chainmail table, one can see that the bonuses and penalties of Greyhawk were
read off of the earlier chart almost verbatim, with slight modifications in
only a few cases. So, for example, assuming a 'normal' Chainmail kill
chance of 8 or more on two dice, a 7 translated into a +1 bonus, a 6 translated
into a +2 bonus, a 9 translated into a -1 penalty, and so on. Now, of course,
in Chainmail there was no extra
downward slant in the table—a lack that no doubt looked odd to some.
Thus, for many weapons in Chainmail you had about the same
chance of hitting (and thus killing) an armored man as an unarmored one (indeed
you had a slightly better chance in a few cases). But this sort of 'flat'
progression in Chainmail translated into imposing the same
bonus or penalty on an already downward sloping set of chances in Greyhawk,
yielding results that seemed more realistic. Thus, armor now usually helps
whatever weapon you are confronting, with different weapons merely having a
different rate of change against certain types of armor.

On its face, this is of course an
improvement on the Chainmail system, while also preserving many of its
virtues. For example, the new system highlights how ineffective most missile
weapons are against heavy armor, especially when fired at medium or long range.
The option of effectively using a dagger or sword against a 'prone' target
remains, although no rules are given for how to get an opponent into that
position.

However, the same historical oddities
and (in my view) mistakes remain. Two-handed swords and flails are still
weirdly misdescribed and are too powerful.

But in my view Greyhawk’s effort was a
failure for many reasons, and the evidence suggests that its system for variable weapon
effectiveness against armor was rarely used in actual play (early players
could help me out by confirming or disconfirming this).

First of all, the historical anomalies
and misdescriptions of certain weapons remain. That's the last time we'll
mention this, as we've beaten this point to death. (Imagine it being fittingly
beaten to death by a modified threshing implement.)

Secondly, the Greyhawk scheme
is too complicated and fussy. You start out by comparing your class and level
with your opponent's armor class (the basic OD&D combat mechanic), but then
you have to look at the new chart to see if you get an extra bonus or penalty
(on top of any other bonus or penalty due to magic, tactical position, etc.).
But you only get this bonus or penalty if the referee judges that the armor
class of your opponent is sufficiently 'armor based' to warrant it. (Even at
this early date, the idea of 'armor class' had diverged from being an actual class
or type of armor—as it was in Chainmail—to often being at least partly
based on other 'defensive' characteristics of the target—its parrying ability,
speed, size or even just innate power or ability to soak up damage.) For the
majority of melee weapons and armor types the bonus or penalty changes things
by no more than 1 point anyway, so one might forgive the referee and players if
they ask why the extra work is really necessary.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly,
the mechanic doesn't increase weapon diversity or player choice. Now, I admit
that it might initially look like it does. So for example, it might be argued
that with the new mechanic we can see a reason why a mace might sometimes be
preferable to a sword—it's more effective against plate armor—or why a flail
might sometimes be preferable to a halberd—it can reach around shields and
penetrate armor better than a halberd can. But I submit that it suppresses
weapon diversity, often in odd ways, if considered in total. For example, there is now even less reason for a
Fighting-Man to even consider using anything but a two-handed sword. The mace
might seem to beat out the sword against plate armor (though it isn't clear
that this would make up for the sword's higher damage roll) but if one looks more
closely, the new bonuses and penalties create new and worse problems. Why ever
choose a mace when you could instead choose a hammer (which gets that extra
unexplained +1 against AC 5)? Or for that matter, why ever choose a hammer
when you could choose a military pick, which is much better against tough armor
while inflicting the same damage as a mace or hammer?

Without sounding too critical, I
honestly doubt that the authors of Greyhawk--Gary Gygax and Rob
Kuntz--thought very hard about these issues or problems. After all, the to hit
bonuses and penalties were so clearly taken from Chainmail, without
really modifying them in the slightest, even though the underlying combat
mechanics of Chainmail and OD&D were very different—a 2d6 curve is
differently shaped than a 1d20 curve, to give one obvious example. Perhaps Jon
Peterson or one of the players from those early days can tell us
whether the Greyhawk weapons vs. armor option was ever really used for
OD&D by the authors or any of their early players. The effort looks to me
like it was merely another combat option offered to sort of fill things out in
the apparent interest of enhancing 'realism', but composed quickly and without
any playtesting. I might be wrong. But if I'm wrong, it frankly makes the
result difficult to justify or explain.

So, I would have to say, unfortunately,
that the variable weapons vs. armor mechanism proposed by Greyhawk was ultimately a failure.

2 comments:

In the comments to Part I, faoladh just linked to an interesting set of posts by Zenopus. I hadn't seen those. I wonder whether the bad editing thing applies to Greyhawk as well as Holmes. I'm too lazy to figure out how to link inside of comments. One of these days...